26/12/2013

Merry Life Day To All!

I hope everyone is having a good Life DayChristmas holiday season.

Last year Bioware "celebrated" the occasion by putting some vaguely Christmas-themed items into the cash shop, and I expected more to follow this year. I was rather surprised when they didn't add anything new to the Cartel Market this time around and actually gave us something to do in game instead. I hesitate to call it a full-blown event because it's not really, but still...

Basically, there are a couple of "Life Day Reveller" NPCs in the GTN section of the fleet, and a vendor that sells you a reusable item to throw snowballs at people, similar to the tinsel bomb. Every time you use it on someone who doesn't already have snowflakes coming out of their ears, you have a chance of finding a "snow-covered parcel", which serves as currency to buy one of two new speeders off the same vendor. And that's it.

My Marauder is not amused to find snow in her eye upon logging in.

There's a part of me that feels like I should really be annoyed by this whole thing. I'm not a fan of having real life holidays invade my MMOs, but if you're going to do it anyway, you might as well do it properly. You call people spam-clicking on other players around the fleet an "event"? Really?

But the truth is... I find it oddly compelling and amusing. Throwing things at other people is one of my favourite pastimes in this game, which is why all of my alts have a Ball Toss and a tinsel bomb. So how could I honestly complain about an event that rewards me for doing more of it and encourages other people to join in the fun?

I can't log on any of my alts on the fleet without finding myself doused with snowflakes instantly, and it cracks me up. You're not limited to throwing snowballs at other players either, you can toss them at friendly NPCs, hostile NPCs (without aggroing, yay!) and even corpses. Our last ops was a mad rush of people trying to "tag" all the trash mobs and at one point I even got a snow-covered parcel from a dead droid.

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